I’ve been doing this writing business for a long time. This is my tenth year as a journalist. (Now I feel old!) Over all that time, I’ve been asked a lot of questions about what I do, how I get it done, and if you can do it too. Here are answers to some of the questions I’m most frequently asked. Feel free to ask others in the comments — I might answer them in a future column.
A little legal disclaimer: my answers are provided for informative purposes only and should not be considered definitive. Your experience will vary.
That aside, on to the number one most asked question of my career…
“You just walk up to famous people and talk to them, right?” (And yes, I’m quoting.)
No. A thousand times no. Seriously, no.
I can’t emphasize that enough. While I wish that were the case — it would make my career a lot easier and I might be cool for the first time in my life — this question is built on the commonly held perception that I now have easy access to every celebrity, and that could not be more wrong. I’ve had to earn and work for every interview or press junket I’ve done. In one case, it took me about a decade. Yes, that’s my entire career.
I’ve been a fan of actor Jack Davenport since he starred in the BBC’s hit sitcom Coupling from 2000-2004. He’s been one of my celebrity crushes ever since. I knew I’d love to interview him. And, so, the great quest of my career was born. The obvious obstacle was that pesky thing called the Atlantic Ocean. Davenport is British, and resides in the United Kingdom, so that put a huge damper on my hopes of meeting him for a long time.
I thought that I got a break when he was cast as Commodore James Norrington in 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. However, I was still at the beginning of my career at the time, and hadn’t yet done enough work to get an invite to the press junket. My only plausible shot was to drive a few hours north and join the general public queue to get into the premiere at Disneyland, and I wasn’t in good enough health at the time to be waiting in a line all day, so it wasn’t a choice for me. I didn’t find out until a few days later that my best friend knew a girl whose father worked at the park, and had gotten her in. She told me that she would have gladly taken me with her. Hindsight’s a … well, you know.
By the time the sequel, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, came out in 2006, I’d lost touch with that mutual friend, so I didn’t make more than a cursory attempt when it came to that movie or the third film, 2007’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. Actually, once I was spoiled regarding certain parts of the third flick, I never even bothered to see it.
When Davenport landed the lead in the CBS series Swingtown in 2008, my interest perked again, but I was by then in the middle of a successful career as a sports journalist. There was no conceivable way for me to swing any sort of coverage of a TV show, especially when I was working baseball games in San Diego and poker tournaments in Las Vegas.
That brings me to last year. Following the failure of Swingtown, Davenport had been cast as Lloyd Simcoe on the ambitious ABC series FlashForward in 2009, and by that point I had moved full time into entertainment journalism. Unfortunately for me, one of my colleagues at the site I then worked for had staked out the show well before he was cast, so my hands were somewhat tied. Even if it wasn’t against protocol, it was certainly against my personal ethics to get involved in someone else’s coverage.
My big break came on March 11, 2010. In my colleague’s absence, I was filling in on FlashForward, and had made inquiries with the ABC publicity team. I’d also bought tickets to the show’s evening at that year’s William S. Paley Television Festival, hoping that Davenport would somehow be there. I figured if nothing else, I could go to the PaleyFest event and take my chances trying to meet him after the panel.
Just days before, however, I received an email from my contacts at ABC, asking if I was interested in doing phone interviews for the show’s return. When I said that I was, they asked me if that meant I wasn’t attending the set visit on the morning of March 11.
“What set visit?” I asked, before I literally rearranged my entire schedule. Then I prepared for a half-dozen interviews, panicked, didn’t really sleep that well, drove several hours north to the studio lot, and panicked some more.
But on the morning of March 11, almost exactly ten years after becoming a fan of his and aspiring to interview him, I finally met Jack Davenport. I shook his hand, asked him all my questions about FlashForward, and thankfully had the time to tell him how much I had always appreciated his work. It was everything that I had hoped it would be. He was even sweet enough to take a picture with me, which sits on my desk as I’m writing this. I keep it there as a reminder that hard work does pay off, if you’re willing to work for long enough.
Most interviews don’t require ten years of almost constant labor, but make no mistake, you do have to work for them. I don’t just walk up to famous people and talk to them. But when everything comes together, that makes all the effort worth it.
Clacked by Brittany Frederick 
on Apr 20, 2011 @ 13:43 EST5EDT
